WORLD BASEBALL CLASSIC HAS FAILED TO HIT A HOME RUN WITH AMERICANS

Don’t forget — as if you could — that 17-0 whoopin’ we put on the South Africans in 2006. With all their country’s diamonds, those dudes couldn’t buy a run against Team USA on an American baseball diamond.

Mercy-ruled ’em, we did, with Ken Griffey Jr.’s two homers and seven RBI and Roger Clemens on the mound for three of the five innings.

Remember, too, how Team USA pounded the Netherlands 9-3 in 2009. OK, so it wasn’t Holland as much as players from Curacao, a tiny island ruled by the Dutch and inhabited by 145,000 people. A team with Jeter, Rollins, Wright and Braun prevailed over guys named deJong, de Caster, van Klooster and VandenHurk.

Say you don’t remember? Thought not.

Know what’s really sad? Those were a couple of the highlights of Team USA’s participation in the first two World Baseball Classics.

Despite the guarantee of home-field advantage for every WBC game they played in 2006 and ’09, the Americans’ overall record is 7-7. Theoretically an assemblage of the best American players playing their own national pastime, Team USA has lost WBC games to teams from the other sides of both borders, Canada and Mexico.

Though loaded with All-Stars, the Americans failed to reach the semifinals of an inaugural tournament won by Japan at Petco Park. Team USA made it to the semis in ’09, but got dusted by the Japanese, the only champions the WBC has had.

The host nation sighed. Then shrugged.

Unless the United States wins the third WBC that begins March 2 with Japan vs. Brazil in Fukuoka and Australia vs. Chinese Taipei in Taichung, Taiwan — or at least manages to make the gold-medal game on March 19 at AT&T Park in San Francisco — there’s a very real danger that Americans will completely give up what little interest they seem to have for a global event decided on their own soil.

Thus begging the question, why even go on holding it here?

The obvious answer being, this is where Major League Baseball lives, and the WBC is MLB’s baby. It’s here where most of the top players in the tournament will report back to spring-training camps in Arizona and Florida, here where they’ll make their lucrative livings all summer.

Much as MLB hypes the WBC and stands to reap considerable financial benefit from it — its own television network is carrying all the games — this overwhelming lack of buzz in the U.S. is largely the fault of MLB in general. And not just because so many Americans think MLB is the only baseball that matters.

Those are major league clubs diminishing the importance of the WBC by trying to withhold their players, fearful of injuries to pitchers throwing full-bore in March, unswayed by the abbreviated pitch counts dictated by WBC rules. Maybe all you need to know is that Team USA manager Joe Torre — a New York Yankees legend — has met resistance in asking his old club to approve 40-year-old lefty Andy Pettitte’s availability for WBC work.